Product Description

You hold in your hand an invitation:

To remember the transforming power of forgiveness and lovingkindness. To remember that no matter where you are and what you face, within your heart peace is possible.

In this beautiful and graceful little book, internationally renowned Buddhist teacher and meditation master Jack Kornfield has collected age-old teachings, modern stories, and time-honored practices for bringing healing, peace, and compassion into our daily lives. Just to read these pages offers calm and comfort. The practices contained here offer meditations for you to discover a new way to meet life’s greatest challenges with acceptance, joy, and hope.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118118 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-27
• Released on: 2002-08-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
Bestselling author Jack Kornfield has put together a how-to book--his most ambitious work yet--to encourage the best side of humanity. In The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, Kornfield uses the evocative power of aphorisms to spark feelings and thoughts that can germinate and grow. After a chapter of aphorisms and quotations on each of the title's three topics, Kornfield offers a related series of meditations that show how to cultivate what the aphorisms have prepared. Whereas essays tend to be read through and forgotten, this book invites a deliberate pace, with the reader filling in the blanks, taking time away for meditation, then coming back for more inspiration. Never descending into triteness, Kornfield is realistic on tough issues, encouraging awareness and persistence over resignation and indifference. If you yearn to open your heart, open the pages of Kornfield's latest. --Brian Bruya

From Publishers Weekly
Over the centuries, many people have kept commonplace books, or repositories of personally meaningful quotations and reflections. Not a diary or a journal, a commonplace book was an individual's means of engaging with the world through the ideas of others. Here, Kornfield (After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and A Path with Heart) offers an uncommonly specialized form of commonplace book, this one focusing on the issues of forgiveness and peacemaking. He casts his net wide, drawing spiritual wisdom from the expected sources (the Dhammapada, the Diamond Sutra, the teachings of the Buddha and various masters) as well as some surprising newcomers for a Buddhist book: Mother Teresa, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, the Tao Te Ching, the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita. Such eclecticism works well in its context; Kornfield strives to demonstrate that forgiveness is a process, and that it is possible for flawed and ordinary people to forgive others and themselves. A concluding section on inner peace is a humble and wise primer; Kornfield makes the point that true inner peace does not arise from withdrawal from the world but from greater connectedness with it. Each section includes actual rituals to encourage readers to forgive, practice lovingkindness and know peace. While the book mines well-trod territory, it does so with perception and grace.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Kornfield here collects charming and thought-provoking Zen-based spiritual truths and insights, some of them paired with quotations from other sources (e.g., the Buddha, William Blake). Kornfield exemplifies the best tendencies of America's interpretation of Zen Buddhism, and his new book will give great pleasure to many readers. For most collections.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Present Teacher
Jack Kornfield is one teacher who undeniably lives in my head. I first read this book over twelve hours of flying across country on three planes, and for one of the few times in my life, I looked up when finishing the book and felt disoriented! What? You mean, it's over? I wanted to keep on flying so I could find hidden pages and read some more! I wanted to read it again, front to back!

That's how good this book is. One needn't be a Zen student to "get" what Kornfield is talking about. Making nimble use of marvelous quotes and his own unique wit and humor, Kornfield offers beautiful meditations on the cornerstones of any worthwhile spiritual practice. He is an author/mentor who always inspires and provokes me. I hope to meet him one day, but for now I delight in knowing he is among us, keeping the Yak butter lamps burning.

--Robert McDowell, The Poetry Mentor (www.robertmcdowell.net), is the bestselling author of POETRY AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE (July, 2008) from Free Press.

Superb, as usual
This little book packs a mighty wallop in that it speaks in a warm, loving, accepting and compassionate way about positive topics. It has helped me to think more clearly about forgiving abuse I experienced as a child. Very comforting and wise! I have used it with a group of Christian women without naming the origin. It was very well received.

Meaningful for any spiritual tradition
I love everything Jack has written or recorded. But what's special about this book is how moving it was to my mother, and how it connected us even though we pursue different spiritual traditions (me Buddhism, her Catholicism). Because this book is divided into short paragraphs, you can read one and then meditate or reflect on it. Each story or quote is worth it. Jack has such a large and wonderful storehouse of quotes and stories from every spiritual tradition, from the Dalai Lama to Martin Luther King. Highly recommended.